Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The monitoring of accelerations is essential for a variety of applications ranging from inertial navigation to consumer electronics. The basic operation principle of an accelerometer is to measure the displacement of a flexibly mounted test mass. Sensitive displacement measurement may be realized using capacitive, piezo-electric, tunnel-current, or optical techniques. While optical readout provides superior displacement resolution and resilience to electromagnetic interference, conventional optical accelerometers either do not allow for chip-scale integration or involve bulky test masses.